Dark Souls 3 Ends the Torture With a Devilish Final Expansion

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Dark Souls 3 Ends the Torture With a Devilish Final Expansion

Namco Bandai

Before I begin The Ringed City, the final downloadable expansion for From Software's existentialist fantasy epic Dark Souls 3, I have to prepare. Unlike most games, the expansions to Dark Souls titles aren't additional, isolated new bits of game—they're embedded directly into the world as it already exists. If you don't have a save file progressed enough to access the new stuff you just bought, you'd better get to playing.

So I do. I dig into a character I haven't touched in months, prodding horrors I've already conquered and moved past. I get stronger struggling against a boss I don't care about fighting. I win and fight another. The whole time, I'm asking myself, in the back of my head: why bother? Why have I ever bothered? With only the vaguest motive in mind, I push forward and gather the necessary strength to win.

The Dark Souls series never makes anything easy. That's much of its allure, to a certain subset of players, so much so that the promotional slogan for the games has often been "Prepare to Die." This is the typical narrative you hear about Dark Souls: that it's good because of the satisfaction that comes from managing insane levels of challenge. It's a rhythm of tension and release, struggling and struggling until you finally breathe the fresh air of victory. This being the world of games, of course, many Dark Souls fans will insist that the exact opposite is true. They're easy, these fans will say. You just don't get it. You have to give it time.

This last expansion is a chance to figure out if that's true or not. A final excursion into the world of Dark Souls—the developers have said that this will be the final game in the main series, at least for the foreseeable future—to try to understand its pleasures. I've loved all these games. But here, at the very end, I'm asking the same questions I asked at the very start: Is this journey worth taking?

Namco Bandai

When, I reach the opening area of The Ringed City, it feels like a metaphor for my exhaustion: Here, reality itself is turning into dust. Dark Souls takes place in a cyclical fantasy world, where hapless humans are forced into lighting a cosmic fire again and again in order to stave off a curse that turns them into deathless monsters. Refusing to light the fire might end the world, or it might save it. Either way, the cycle has finally taken its toll on the fabric of space and time, and when The Ringed City begins—in the far future? In another dimension? These details are, as always, left underdetermined for the inquisitive player to question—every kingdom and city is being pushed together in a spherical miasma toward the very center of the world, like a cosmic trash heap.

When you arrive, you aren't welcomed. Sprites bleed out of the ground unexpectedly, clawing at your feet or blasting you with projectiles bearing eerie, childlike faces. Chunks of the environment break unexpectedly under you. Later, a creature that looks like a desiccated angel, its wings just tendrils of flesh, accosts you from a distance with arrows of pure light. I have to run from cover to cover, like an infantryman ducking machine-gun fire. This place is all of Dark Souls's cruelest tricks stacked on top of each other. It's almost dazzling—or it would be if I could live long enough to appreciate it. I die in these opening sections dozens of times. Every so often, I stop playing and clench my right hand, so that I don't throw my controller.

The difficulty of Dark Souls isn't the challenge of climbing a rock wall—it's the challenge of picking open a stubborn, rusty lock. Focusing on what you're doing, having the patience to persist until you begin to notice the details that at first you'd missed.

Hardcore fans are right when they say that this isn't difficult in the traditional sense, though. Getting through these challenges—any of the challenges across any of the Dark Souls games—isn't a matter of physical dexterity, or mastering a complex sequence of maneuvers, or even of memorization. Rather, it's about accruing the right knowledge base. In its core controls and movements, Dark Souls is dreadfully simple, a slow, rhythmic series of attack and defense maneuvers. Every action takes a certain amount of time, taking up a certain amount of finite stamina. Wait for openings of defenselessness in your opponent's movements, and then attack. When they signal their attacks—because every movement in the game has a clearly readable tell—you either get out of the way, or use a shield to block it.

The problem is that this simple system can be incredibly punishing. Enemies hit hard, and you don't have much health. Worse yet, every death costs you the materials you need to improve your character. To handle this, you have to learn the arcana of the game's systems: How to upgrade your weapons, when to run back to safe places, how to best handle groups of enemies. The game explains precious little of this; instead, its pedagogy boils down to "die until you get it." The difficulty of Dark Souls isn't the challenge of climbing a rock wall—it's the challenge of picking open a stubborn, rusty lock. Focusing on what you're doing, having the patience to persist until you begin to notice the details that at first you'd missed.

The fan community will insist that anyone can beat Dark Souls, and they're right. You can—if you decide you want to. The question is one of reward. What do I get for opening that door? Usually, it's another room with another stubborn lock. A whole series of doors leading ... where, exactly?

When I finally surmount the challenges of the trash heap of The Ringed City's early spaces, I reach a boss fight. Two demons, wreathed in fire and hate. Nothing new or interesting. I summon help from another player—another system to master if you want to make progress—and move on. One more door open.

Namco Bandai

And then I reach the Ringed City itself. Somehow, even at the end of the world it shimmers in dappled sunlight. Cathedral domes erupt from the architecture, massive buildings flanked by gardens. Below, a purple swamp stretches out to infinity, parts of the city slowly sinking into it.

It's almost idyllic despite the ruin. And that's when I remember why I've come here—and why, I can only imagine, so many other players have journeyed here as well. What we're doing in this terrible world of adversity and unending death. The Ringed City is beautiful, strange, and mysterious in a way that captivates me. I've never been anywhere quite like this before.

I don't care, at this moment, about how many times I'm going to die, or about the shitload of monsters that are going to do me in. I just care about this place. I want to see the Ringed City, uncover its secrets, and try to figure out what it's doing here. I'm prepared to die; not because I want to die, but because it seems worth it.